Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘discipline’ functions not as a punitive imposition but as the constitutive condition of psychological and spiritual development. The term traverses several distinct registers. In Hadot’s reconstruction of Stoic practice, discipline is explicitly tripartite — of desire, impulse, and assent — forming the living correlate to philosophy’s theoretical branches; Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus furnish the canonical articulation of this schema, wherein each discipline corresponds to a distinct mode of the soul’s relation to cosmos, community, and self. In the Taoist I Ching commentary tradition (Liu Yiming), discipline is framed temporally and organically: it must accord with time rather than with mere will, and its failure produces either ineffective quietism or the wound of self-inflicted lament. Fromm, from a psychoanalytic-humanist perspective, distinguishes rational self-imposed discipline from irrational authoritarian discipline, arguing that the modern rebellion against the latter has catastrophically dissolved the former, leaving psychic life ‘shattered and chaotic.’ Bion raises the question of discipline specifically for the neurotic, recognising that military order alone is therapeutically insufficient. Plato’s Laws grounds discipline in civic formation, directing it toward the young whose reason remains unregulated. The deepest tension across these sources is between discipline as external constraint versus inner transformative practice — a tension that unifies the otherwise disparate Stoic, Taoist, psychoanalytic, and depth-psychological voices.